


Without Home

by rednightmare



Series: Below the Storm [3]
Category: Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Video Game)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Healing, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery, Trauma, parental abandonment/neglect
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-22
Updated: 2019-02-22
Packaged: 2019-11-03 15:35:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,824
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17880452
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: Ma, who knew more about ash and ruin than you’d think, once warned Father not to heal a wound with hot coals.“You be careful rushing things with fire,”she said.“You’ll get the bleeding stopped, for certain. But once it has—if it sickens—you’ll have a Hell of a time ever letting the blood back out.”The whole world goes to fire. Henry waits to bleed again for a long time.  Vignettes, one-shot.





	Without Home

**Author's Note:**

> This story contains spoilers. _Without Home_ is a free-standing piece, but for maximum effect, I recommend reading [A STRANGE HUNT](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13982742/chapters/32193840l) first. 
> 
> **HISTORICAL FICTION DISCLAIMER** : Like the video game it's derived from, WITHOUT HOME is not a work of nonfiction. I've attempted to extend Warhorse's lifelike and believable medieval world, but do be aware that historical details have been altered and/or presumed where hard facts are either unavailable, inconsistent with KCD's characterization/narrative, or simply not conducive to good storytelling. Please do not use it as learning material or as a reference text.

The horses are prettiest when the day’s work is over, and they are let free.

He does not know much of the language of horses. The young Lord Capon has taught him all a rider needs to know, or so His Lordship claims—how to sit, how to fall, how to spur, how to race—but riding can’t be everything. There must be more to life than moving toward what is ahead of you from what is behind.

Henry spends more time at Neuhof, among the sounds and smells of horses, than he thought he might. The investigation takes a long time, and Sir Radzig’s lad is always poking his head into the stables to ask another question about this or that. He trots up sloppily on his pokey dapple gray and lets it wander, bridle and all, the upper hills, picking at thistle flowers under the April sun. Not everything touched by fire remains destroyed.

The memory of death isn’t far away here. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine the horseblood and the crows on the bodies of foals. But for now, the pastures are pale green, the pondwater is full of lilies, and the breeze marries sweet October hay with apple trees. Calmness has survived, despite everything, and Mistress Zora reminds him of his mother. Unseriously, for they are a touch too young, he imagines marrying one of her daughters so that he might casually call _Ma?_ into a stable as he puts a little filly away. He knows less of horses than the heir of a stud farm ought to. But he could learn, thinks the blacksmith’s boy. He could yet become something new.

 

* * *

 

He learns about things. Some all at once—too quickly to make sense of. Others bit-by-bit, like picking daisies off the path. He is lucky to have so many teachers. Theresa teaches him how to fix tears in his shirt and how to creep in bare feet and how to blacken the edges of pancakes just-so. Captain Bernard teaches him fighting. Sir Hanush teaches him how to behave properly around nobles, Sir Radzig how to listen and remember, and young Lord Capon teaches the blacksmith’s boy how to forget everything for the thrill of the hunt. Henry learns all these things and more. But there are other knowledges in the world, he finds, that cannot be taught. These he must seek on his own.

Pebbles does not teach Henry all there is to know about horses, but he does teach him all about Pebbles. He teaches him not to use itchy saddle blankets in the summer. He teaches him that peeled carrots are better than skin-on, and to never trust a canter on muddy roads. He teaches Henry not to fuss overmuch with his ears, but that a scratch under the chin is a sure way to keep a friend.

Far away, the scorched houses cool in Skalitz. He carries his shield around the Rattay castle yard, running drills. He hunts hares in the Rattay wood. He works through the knots in his horse’s tail.

He is without home for a long time. He is not, at least, without a feeling of what is normal in this new world opened up by fire.

 

 

There is a spot in the meadows beyond Neuhof where the shade of an old pear tree has given shelter to clean grass and yellow flowers. He comes here at times to think. He has other places; Sir Hanush has given him a room in the bailey, and Theresa will usually give him good advice if he helps carry flour or hang laundry, and young Lord Capon will surely pour him a sip of whatever he's drinking and let him into the castle study (provided his uncle is not around). But his humble room is dark and smells of stable; and Theresa will tire him out with millwork, making Bernard’s morning drills that much harder; and Hans will distract him with games and nonsense until Henry can’t remember anything else he is meant to do. Thinking is better when no one knows where you are.

One day, as he sits under this pear tree to think about the investigation in Uzhitz, a hatchling falls into his lap. Some cowbird has thrown it out to hide its own children inside the nest of better parents. But when Henry climbs halfway up for a closer look, the stunted bird shivering in his palm, another egg is already nestled there. He cannot decide which deserves its life. Neither knows more than the other where or whether or not it belongs.

 _Sometimes it’s the kindest thing can be done,_ Mother told him once, when he was a boy and could not bear to watch her crush a cat-maimed chick with a rock. Afterwards, she tossed the little body back to the hungry queen. _If everything could live,_ she said, _nothing would for very long._

He cannot bring himself to do it. Instead—knowing better, but hoping—he leaves the orphaned swallow in last year’s nest, praying someone will come back, looking for what has survived.

 

* * *

 

There is a horsecart broken on the road from Skalitz. He found it that day he went back, in the rain.

He cannot recall anyone’s face. He must’ve seen them, certainly—else he would not be so sure of who is dead. But there are only partial glimpses left stuck in the fleshes of his eye. They shake loose now and again, when there’s a whiff of burning wood from a smokehouse or a smack of a hen's neck under the butcher’s knife or when he wakes in the night and it is too dark to remember anything. A dropped pouch of walnuts. A tong of Deutsch’s pitchfork. Bloody yellow hair mussed over an ear. A copper brooch clutched in Markéta’s fingers. The twist of crimson cloth over the too-white ankle over Bianca’s left shoe.

The only face he can see clearly in his mind is the charcoal burner’s lad, lying there among his spilt charcoal and the ruin of cart on the Rovna road. He can’t understand why anyone would do that to the poor boy. Why you would kill someone running away.

It is this face Henry sees in his dreams, lips and nostrils worried with thick black flies. He hears buzzing, sometimes, in the dark. He wakes before dawn in a hot sweat, scratching at the feet of ghost insects that are not really crawling upon his cheeks.

He thinks of horse bones settling into the dirt, under his heels. On certain evenings, when the red Rattay sun catches unsettled dust in just the wrong way and a patrolman’s spurs jangle toward caste hill, Henry steps off the road. He walks instead on the grass.

Under red mornings, he crosses even the grass barefoot, carrying a comb and crushed orange flowers. It is too early to talk. But marigold water keeps the flies out of Pebbles’s eyes.

 

* * *

 

At first, he asks Theresa all the time if she ever thinks of home.

 _No,_ she insists. The brown river shivers its cattails along a narrow byroad, and their feet hurt from the day’s labor, but they never say no to this walk. The water plants are in bloom and pretty. And the breeze is always just enough to do them good.

“I can’t believe that,” Henry tells her. “Surely you must, sometimes. You have to still think about home.”

But she never was one for you-have-tos. And so he fears, for a moment, she’s ignored him. Henry sheepishly follows suit as Theresa stops on a clearing of dry grass to pull off her boots and the let cool current ease the aches of working all day. His legs bother him, too; they slosh among minnows and skipper bugs only a few steps before finding a warm outcropping of limestone; they brush it off with their sleeves until it’s clean enough to sit upon. They face fields of daisies and white yarrow. Fish bite at the fingers of willow trees. Her hair is the same color of the river in softest part of summer, almost. If you tucked it behind her ear, he wonders, bizarrely, maybe you could see clearly into what she's thinking below the surface.

“Rattay is my home—and yours, too,” she reminds him. The hem of her coarse dress is wet and the flour stuck there will turn tacky, but Theresa does not care. Henry rests beside her on the bank and hasn’t anything more important to say.

He tries, though. He can only remember some things, not all. He can only make a suggestion, worried anything firmer than that would be dangerous in way of a spark to a barn full of straw.

“Well, _now_ ,” he says, “but not always.”

“Skalitz doesn’t exist anymore. It isn’t anywhere. And neither that girl,” she insists. The water murmurs over rocks and through the froggy reeds, going elsewhere. To other lands, he supposes. Other villages where other people, unburnt, still live. “And neither that boy.”

He can’t tell her no. Or yes, or maybe, or any old thing, if all he can see in the dark behind his eyes is a home that doesn’t exist. And so Henry only folds his arm around her slack shoulders and pulls this new girl to his side tight.

Without looking, Theresa kisses his rough hand where it rests beside her cheek. Then she reaches her own arm around him and hugs his waist hard. Some things are beyond sight or language. So some places, too.

Uphill, the soldiers ride their fleet horses in circles, practicing war. Later, when evening makes the castle look like blistered clay, this new boy will put on his army colors and go to them with his shield. But that is later. Now, he will sit with his feet in the river and her head on his shoulder, waiting for the wind to change.

This is his life now, he realizes. Maybe forever. Maybe for a while.

 

* * *

 

There are times Henry feels like a stray pony locked outside the barn. There are worse things to be, he supposes. He goes wandering from friend to friend with cuts on his legs and briars in his hair, looking for a place to sleep.

He brings flowers. To Theresa—though to tell true, he picks them for himself, to remind him of things. But her smile is too rare and too easy not to turn them over right away.

Before, Henry cannot recall caring much for flowers. An occasional bell-blossom plucked for his ma, or a careless bouquet to trade for a girl's kiss, or a handful of lavender to sweeten the house—always for some reason. He did not really notice small beauty then. He could not have understood flowers-for-flowers’ sake.

That is who his old self was, but everything is different now. There are too few things that make him remember the world as a live and tender place. He walks his horse toward the city and carries an overflow of marigolds like fragile little sundrops in his fist.

St. John’s are the easiest to spot. Yarrows are his favorites, for they remind him of Theresa, stubborn white and simple in their prettiness, which happies his heart. Chamomile brings luck—good or bad, he can’t seem to recall. Wild rosebush makes him think of Lord Capon, fine and daring but will smart you if you let them. Lupines he likes only for what they are.

Poppies he leaves for Bianca, whose name is too painful to remember like this. Touching one might make him die. He likes them better growing free on the hillside, anyway, crimson as her windblown dresses, red bonnets under blue sky.

 

 

He asked his father once, _What’s the harm in wanting to see more of the world?_

Father said there is more out there than cities and forests and oceans. He said there are dark places on earth. He—who had traveled farther and learned faster than anyone Henry knows—said there is less newness than you think, less adventure than you’d want, and that there is more to a world than a sane man can see.

 _Even if,_ Henry jokes, _I come home in time for supper?_

You can go home, Father says, softly, and pulls a sword glowing out of hot coals. But you’ll never come back.

 

* * *

 

He cannot remember the face of the first man he killed but he remembers everything else. He remembers looking at the clean Cuman tents and the bright oak trees and trying to wake Lord Capon. He remembers noticing suddenly the young lord’s ugly split lip and the smell of warm dogs’ blood and the sound of the dark hunting horse stamping its hooves. He remembers going dizzy in all that surreal green and feeling the certainty that this cannot be his life. He remembers thinking he would at any second bolt up from his strange and stormy dream.

 

* * *

 

At Neuhof, there is a small pond, tucked away among the buttercups between Old Smil’s receiving yard and the main stable. Groomsmen fish from it and foals play Fox-and-Geese in the shallows. Mistress Zora is always chasing them out whenever the skies turn threatening and thunder rolls up from the woods beyond her hill.

Henry would like to enjoy this small place. Jakub is always inviting him to sit down and cast a line. Mark plays dice there with the squash farmers. Twice, Ginger called him over to share lunch with blushing Zlata on the modest dock, among the lily pads and dragonflies. But he cannot step a bootheel upon it without remembering the dead stableboy who once dragged himself to the water to die.

He remembers freezing in the yard among the swollen bodies of mares, of Zora with horseshit and her husband’s blood smeared across her cheerful yellow sleeping gown, of tiny sounds hitting like thrown stones, of Ruda giving him a nudge that made things snap colorless and muted for a while. He could not seem to move his legs. He could have sworn the broken hinges and smoldering hay shed were the smell and clank of Father’s forge.

 _Let me do something,_ he’d begged Bernard, in a voice that came heavily like silver ore upon his tongue, under a feeling that he had not ever opened his mouth. Tell me anything, he swore. Anything, and I'll do it.

Captain Bernard is a hard man, but he is not without mercy. He’d turned his newest guardsman sternly about by the shoulders and pointed him out—away from the bloodflies and hamstrung corpses, from slippery horsegut and slit throats—towards the unspoiled gardens and open air.

Henry has no memory of being given the order to investigate, even today. He simply walked, ghost-legged, across the studfarm and toward the only thing he could certainly hear. And when Zlata looked up at him, crying weakly over her killed friend in the cut grass beyond that pond, Henry of Skalitz was of no help, at all. He could not help anyone. Bernard’s men came to carry the bodies away and as she clung to the limp arms, sobbing _no_ , all Henry could do was stand in the smoke and stare into the shear of sun.

He asks Zora later: How do you know when a place is yours again?

She says: When you stop trying to find your way home.

 

* * *

 

Once, Henry asks Sir Radzig if he will reclaim their home—when _this_ , the blacksmith figures inelegantly, is over, and Sigismund returns the country to something like itself again, and the crabgrass regrows over the burnt village green. Lord Skalitz stands in his foggy hill camp over the Rovna road and gives him no real answer. Talmberg wakes sleepily in the distance beyond the spider webs and skinny pines. And with a path in sight that will, if followed, take them there—to the past and the bones and the roaming dogs—Henry nearly wishes he hadn’t asked.

“One head of the Hydra at a time, my boy,” says Radzig finally, popping his leather gloves together. Henry wants to ask Sir Radzig so much more. He wants to ask how he met his father, and why, and if he ever missed the blacksmith's friendship when he became too old for it. He wants to hear all kinds of stories. He wants to ask if there is any such thing as righteous vengeance. He wants to ask if the lord of a place that no longer exists has many regrets. He doesn't ask any of this, though. Radzig merely tells him: “A man whose fortress is under siege oughtn’t waste precious time building better castles in his head. When the beast in front of us is slain, there will perhaps be time to ask ourselves what one does with the rest of his life.”

He does not ask more of Radzig. He understands now that there is much of life that cannot be put into words—that some things you cannot just simply _tell_. There are dark places with bright edges on this earth and there are things you cannot learn.

 

 

When he leaves Radzig and returns to Rattay, slowed by his rusting helm and filthy gambeson—for it is that season, now, of mist and autumn rain—Henry asks Captain Bernard what can be done about flooding in the refugee camp. He asks Bailiff Borislav if they could dig some drain trenches. He would like to ask Sir Hanush if the castaway Skalitz folk might all move instead to higher ground, below the training yard, where gathered waters will sluice over cliffsides instead of churning all their cooking pits into soupy mud.

When no one gives him a straight answer, Henry complains instead to Lord Capon, who he knows will be of no help at all—who won’t quite understand the nature of the problem—who will ask, instead, why the refugees can’t simply build new houses, or sleep in Radzig’s tower, or raise a younger and prettier town of their own up the pine hill and live there happily for five hundred years. He will demand a good reason why they can’t all just say _to hell with the Order of Things_ and feed hungry people with deer and dark wine. He will dispatch a wagonload of warm blankets and fresh pork pies and hot mead to the camp and wonder angrily why an act of clear-cut love does not fix the world.

When all else fails, he will, of course, propose distraction. He will make vicious jokes and tell Henry to strip, to look away from what’s bothering him, to drown his foul mood in spiced drink and honeyed soap.

“I suspect asking your actual governor-and-master what _he’ll_ do about it was as useful as talking to a jenny’s arse,” Hans supposes from his bath while Henry struggles to heel off his dirty boots. The sharp-faced young lord calls a house maid to bring hotter water and looks for all the world like a wet fox with his hair all drippy bronze and candle-bright and his two elbows propped belligerently on the lip of the tub. “I suspect he told you it’s a God-given test of character, those sick peasants all coughing their holiness up.”

“I don’t know if he said that, exactly.”

“Oh, no? You didn’t go in with one question about people in tents and leave with five philosophies on The Self or The Divine Dialectic or some other high-flown fuckery? _’Ah, it appears you have a simple query for me, young Henry. Food for the peasants? A curious proposition, no doubt—but first thing being first,’_ ” Hans-as-Radzig demurs, a dulcet and scholarly caricature, nose-up in his suds. One pontificating whirl of the young lord’s pointer finger stirs humid bathhouse air, and he tosses his heels up carelessly on the basin edge. Hans is no picture of a good ruler, either. But he is exciting to listen to and to look at; he does interesting things and is difficult to think slowly around; he always finds his fun. “ _‘It seems I’ll need someone to investigate the enormous stick piked up my arsehole!’_ ”

Henry tries not to laugh at Hans’s games, for despite all, he is a little fond of Radzig, somehow. And because he thinks it better not to all-the-time give the young lord what he wants. “That’s at least halfway unfair.”

“‘ _Indeed—thank you for the intellectually sound and thoroughly dispassionate defense, Henry, my lad. All is just as I already deduced, naturally, on my own. I shudder to think what that drunken wastrel Sir Hans would do,’”_ swears Sir Hans, splashing with make-believe indignity as Henry in the corner fights mud-stuck hose off and over his knees, “‘ _were it not for my regular contributions.'”_

“Oh, sure, the scamp. It’d be something rash, no doubt.” The blacksmith surrenders one bemused harrumph as he shakes out his weather-tortured hose with a dismal, filthy slap.

 _“'And how right you are, dear boy. I daresay the waterlogged reprobate is apt to overreact in a fit of pique. He might, oh, say, stop paying my soldiers their wages for me. A truly despotic maneuver. Why,'”_ he snorts, groping down for his cup on the floor, burning a little too earnest in his flippancy. A sour gulp of wine, and a portion of Radzig is lost. “' _He might even quit letting me lie up rentless in his castle, perish the thought! Where_ then _would I hide from my starving subjects?’”_

“All right, all right,” Henry admits, grimacing at the harshness of too much honesty and at the cold on his belly as the buttons of his padded coat come undone. “That one gets closer to fair.”

“You’re fucking right, it does.” The hiss on Sir Hans’s drawn _f_ gives him up for drunk. Henry wonders if it was at all like this between Father and Radzig, briefly, but the thought makes his nose wrinkle and his face bunch-up so much that Hans squawks: “Quit snarling bare-arsed like a rabid whore! I won’t speak another word to you until you’re wet and drunken. And bring the pitcher while you’re at it. Zdena is trying her best to boil me alive.”

When Zdena slips in then like a witch whose name has been whispered, carrying a steaming ewer to refresh the bath, she curtsies coyly. The blacksmith, wine pitcher in hand, struggles to hide his bare lower half, which makes Lord Capon snigger cruelly as she pours. _“Benighted little village boy! There’s nothing in the whole wide world this good healer hasn’t already seen,”_ he cries, and for one almost-moment, the village boy wants to disagree—wanted to say _that’s impossible_ —nearly swears that one can never see so much of the world and remain in it, laughing and breathing, as though a vital limb of you has not been seared away.

Zdena leaves a draft of rainy night air behind her, and Henry, who is still holding the jug in front of his cock like Adam and Eve’s red-eared cousin, tries to glare his blush off.  

Hans, insensitive to nakedness, slides down in hot water and thumps the base of his skull woozily onto the rim. His gray eyes are somehow still bright as fire in the dark and his hands are soft and his skin sun-tempered and Henry can’t definitely separate desire from envy. He knows he, for his own part, is not handsome. But young Lord Capon, who has handsomeness in abundance, seems to find it of no consequence. He does not care about the mud or the blood or any of that.

“Gooseflesh,” he sneers, unkindly. Henry shivers in his gambeson. “Sad thing. Off with the last of it, you chicken—don’t stand there and quiver like somebody plucked your thighs.”

“And if I rebel?”

“Go find another lord to wash your back, then.”

He spares only one more interrupting thought for the past, for fathers and history, things that came before and then before that. And he decides Radzig could never have been like this. Not in his youth or wildest dreams. So he tosses his filthy, cold coat for the nearest table and misses it, then he steps over the young lord’s recklessly discarded boots, then he passes the wine jug to Hans and settles one-leg-and-two down into a warm, clean bath. He feels his focus on things outside unraveling and the immensity of this gratitude seems like it could mimic happiness, for an hour or a day or a night.

“There’s no one like you,” he’s sure, quietly—certain of this, at least.

“Bad young lords? Pah!” Hans squawks, and kisses Henry right on the mouth, and hurls his empty cup to drink lukewarm wine straight from the pitcher, instead. “There’s a thousand like me. There’s a thousand like you, too.”

The bad young lord pushes drink back into his hands, urging Henry to forget. He tells him to swallow his shyness and goodness and godliness until he can't taste anything but wine—just wine and nature and truth, he says, throwing a long limb ‘round his neck and patting the blacksmith’s cheek, not defining Truth, not caring about the dirt or their differences. And though the arm slung across his shoulders is carefree and sloppy with friendliness, Hans plays at the back of his head with lovers' fingers. Cut nails worry his short hairs and he rubs a thumb over the highest bump of his neck until Henry's lashes are a hundred pounds each and his bones turn to jelly. He scratches off a little stuck sand and flicks it out of the tub. He says that once the road washes off, he’ll call Zdena back in and they’ll all three together have some proper wicked fun.

But this is all promise. In the real world, right there in the young lord's bath, Henry drinks one cup of wine and is too tired to drink anymore. So instead of wickedness, Hans lets him sleep on his shoulder in hot water that smells of limes and wildflowers. He reminds himself that this is normal, now. This is his life when nothing is wrong.

 

* * *

 

One morning in fall, he rides alone toward Sasau. The rivergrass is thick with blue crickets and his horse feigns thirst. As Pebbles makes a game of splashing nose-first in cool water, Henry kicks off his boots to sit along the bank and eat rabbit sausage on old bread.

While he is resting, a girl who looks in face and age like one of Zora’s daughters wades through the scrub to beg him for food. She wolfs his lunch and with bulging cheeks tells him she is a farrier’s youngest child. She tells him this is the first she’s eaten in three days. She tells him how bandits murdered her father on the way to Samopesh with the sharp end of a hoof file. She tells him she’d dropped at his urging into a honeysuckle bush and smelled her pa’s blood splatter warm leaves. She tells him she crawled away once they’d left and stumbled, lost, for nights, drinking rainwater from her cupped hands.

She pleads with him to help her go back into the deepwoods and bury Father. She whines with thin and dizzy-throated panic when he tells her it isn’t safe; that there might still be bandits around, picking through the leaves like feral dogs. Henry tries to calm her. He bids her stay put at his humble picnic spot, offers more food, asks her to please mind Pebbles while he wades into beech trees to take a look. She does not want to be alone, she says.

It’s only for a little while, he promises. The girl sits in a boneless heap upon his spread saddle blanket and stares into the river and cannot seem to speak anymore.

He finds the corpses, sure enough. On a shallow bridleway in this chestnut forest, two men lie killed in milkweed flowers, stripped of their belongings and rain-rotten enough that Henry does not wish to search for birthmarks or moles or crooked ears. There is nothing left behind to tell him which was the farrier and which the apprentice—or if they were ever horsemen, at all—if you could ever tell a father from a son or if you could tell a craftsman slain in random violence from a homeless blacksmith burned out of a silver mine.

Henry does not have a shovel. So, with nothing yet to do, he means to return to the poor girl, to let her know he’s found her pa and give her battered heart a rest. But when he arrives, she is gone. She’s stolen his pack of dried beef and the good spurs Mistress Zora gave him special and all of his traveling money. Judging from the offended whinny and the broken reeds, she must’ve tried to steal Pebbles, too. Henry is left eating wild blackberries and begging a glass merchant for enough groschen to get home.

Fire bends things into new shapes. Blacksmiths know this law of physic better than most. Henry, for his part, accepts it as nature, as truth; he does need to know the precise science; he does not bother asking God why some people twist one way in the smoke and others that. This is his life now, too.

 

* * *

 

 _“How many times! Wrong tense, blacksmith. Can’t you remember your basics, you fucking cabbage?”_ Lord Capon caws, lunges halfway across the red oak table, and snatches the wet quill from his pupil’s hand. Scratched ink spoils the parchment and hawkfeather sails arrowlike through the book-stale air of Jan Ješek’s old study. It isn’t really about learning Latin, Henry thinks, flashing Hans an annoyed face as he goes to retrieve his pen.

“Once more, clearly.”

“Once more, it is!” the young lord bristles, claps one-two, and points the blacksmith stubbornly back to his papers. The smell of fine wine overpowers the leather musk of the dead old lord's decaying books and whatever incorrect thing Henry had just written. Hans’s finger on _erat tempus_ smudges black. Henry loves him like first love, even though it isn’t. The wrong Latin reads: _It was time—_

 _Stop thinking and focus, you blockhead!_ Hans cries. _Now learn! And repeat after me:_

 _SUM_  
_ES_  
_EST_

I AM  
YOU ARE  
IT IS

 

* * *

 

When he is alone, with no hares to hunt and no bandits to track and no terrible lords causing a ruckus to distract him, Henry thinks and thinks and thinks. He thinks himself out of focus. Often, he thinks of Theresa. He wonders what she is thinking of among the apple trees, gazing riverside behind her uncle’s mill.

 _“Do you remember,”_ he always asks her, bringing daisies or fresh fruit or sweetbread from the baker’s stall, “ _how it was, before?”_

 _No_ , she swears; it doesn’t seem matter what he said.

_“You do! Come, now. You have to remember that.”_

_“I don’t recall,”_ she tells him. Her hands folded around little laceflowers on the outdoor table are callused and cold.

He asks:

_Remember the dances? Remember Deutsch getting drunk and doing that awful little jig?_

_Remember the spotty old bull with the raspy moo? When Matthias tied antlers on it, and poor Agnes went howling to Father Francis at two o’clock in the morning, screaming that a demon possessed her cow?_

_Remember that one winter you cut home across the low pond, and fell through a patch of thin ice? And I came barreling down the hill in my mittens and jumped in after you! Some help I was; I couldn’t swim a lick. I nearly died! You had to paddle us out on the cold grass and compress me._

_Remember when Fritz and I made those God-forsaken oatcakes, and you threw up on Johanka’s shoes?_

_Remember putting eggs in Kunesh’s hat?_

He asks: Do you remember your apple tree, Treesa?  Don’t you remember how sharp everything used to taste? 

Henry, she says, like it hurts, and lays aside her flowers to take his whole face in her hands. He never has to ask about Bianca. He knows some things they will remember until it kills them. Theresa looks deep into his eyes and she says _Hush, now._

 

 

They kiss one night under a drenched laundry line and sleep together, but something happens, and then she doesn’t seem to want him anymore. He wakes up alone, confused as to why. Her touches feel anemic and her words become sparse. She ties her hair tighter. They still walk the riverpath in evening, stepping among clumsy golden crickets and earlybird fireflies—but their trips grow tenser and shorter, their footsteps more focused, and it becomes difficult to talk to her. The taste in his mouth goes unhealthy, like roasting meat in foundry smoke. He wants to ask what’s changed, but the right questions do not come to him. He loves her but he can’t describe the way.

“It should truly have been her here,” Theresa tells him sometimes in these days, almost too quiet to hear, as he struggles to keep up with her tough white dress through the reeds. Henry wants to break into a run and grab her by the arms. He wants to pull the crimson cloth Bianca stitched him away from his mouth and swear _no_. He wants to find the right color flower to put in that hole. But the words burns themselves to cinders before they form, making his whole throat taste like bone ash. “It should have been, and it’s wrong that she isn’t. Alive, with you. Instead of it being me. I bet you wish that it was.”

“I don’t,” he says, but he doesn't seem to have a voice, anymore.

She does not look back—not to see if anything is following, not to demand proof, and not to remember the look of his hurt face in his red scarf. Theresa turns hard toward the brown water and the wetness in her eyes is a scorcher, too.

She says: I do.

Henry stops asking _do you remember_. For mercy’s sake, he does not bring any flowers for a while.

 

* * *

 

The Neuhof investigation takes him far and wide. It seems to Henry that no matter where he goes, he is always looking for a place to stop and be.

For weeks, he roves across open fields, digging for bandit tracks in the dirt. It is foggy and bleak in the bluegrass thickets around Merhojed, where Radzig’s army is a suggestion of sodden white tents in the distance and farmlands are spread thinly-out. Henry is lonely for people who want him. He hides his cold nose in his old red scarf. He picks wet yarrow from horseback just to carry tiny flowers in his fist. He sits in a rough blanket beneath a soaked canvas when it rains and, though he knows he should not keep touching the delicate fabric, unpacks and huffs his fine shirt, seeking a leftover note of the young lord’s woodruff perfume. At breakfast, cooking wild mushrooms with whatever dried meat is left in his pack, he sings Pebbles his mother’s working song.

He cannot remember word-for-word exactly how it goes, now. There’s a part that is something like:

 _The Fates command, and I must go,_  
_Leaving the land so dear to me_  
_Here my heart has suffered a heavy blow_  
_But what is left to love, thus leaving thee?_

 

 

 _“You’re a good boy, Hal,”_ Ma used to tell him when he’d done something bad—as though if she told him so enough, he’d accept this goodness inside of himself, and banish all his roaming dreams. _“But you ought to be more considerate of your poor old Da.”_

It was always Da she worried over. Mother would tut up-and-down at young Henry about cleverness and nonsense and bandying and sloth and staying up too late. She would warn him about shiftless friends and nasty business and sleeping too much. She would scold him over strange bruises and lazy bones. But these fears were never, he knows now, for her sake. Ma had too much mischief to say _no_ on account of her own nervous heart. She was always more wayward, always more wandering, always more green-eyed, always more dreamy, always more like and closer to him.

“I know you want to run just a little bit wild, my lad! And how it is, at your age. I was a stray cat once, too. But your father,” she’d chide him, passing Henry a basket of fresh-picked garden grapes or gesturing for a pair of weed-cutters or pointing him to stir a soup pot, “can’t bear the worry, you know. He doesn’t have the stomach to let what he loves up to chance anymore. He needs to know you and I are going to be all right. Promise you'll give him that, won’t you?”

Henry, for his part, hadn’t come to appreciate mercy. He had not yet learned what it is like to need drain your heart of sound and blackness before you can understand joy.

“You want me to promise nothing bad will ever happen? Ma! Do you want me to lie, then? I’m not in charge of the world. I can’t promise nothingness,” the blacksmith’s son, fingers bruised from false fights, would complain.

And Mother would lay down her spoon and sigh out and wipe cooked red jam from the palms of her hands. He remembers that sweetness in his head now. How fruit tasted in winter. How it looked, on her apron, like the prints of shot rabbit feet in deep snow.

“Of course _I_ know that, Henry,” she’d muttered, and with a snort and a pinch at his elbow, gave her boy’s bandage a stinging pat. “But we promise anyway. Let your old man have his rest, at least.”

Let him live, she said. Let him come home in peace.

 

* * *

 

 _The world looks clearer when you’re young,_ Sir Hanush tells him as they ride down from Divish's war camp through the tall ryegrass, toward Captain Bernard’s where it squats on Talmberg's dusty white quarry. The Steward of Rattay sits astride a large liver brown horse and wears a breast of blued steel, and he does not really need an escort anywhere, but lets Henry tag along for lack of other things to do. He says: “Good and evil, right from wrong—to a young man, it’s all obvious as day and night. But you’ll find, as you go on, that the world’s not as simple as it looks. That’s as true for a lord as it is for a blacksmith,” he says. He says, “It’s as true for me as it is for you.”

Under the uncharitable sun, Henry looks upfield, toward Talmberg’s castle tower, where Radzig and Lady Stephanie must be. He does not like to imagine the hospitality with which Istvan Toth treats old friends. He is yet uncertain as to how Radzig’s name fits differently inside his ear, and mouth, and chest. If it ought to feel better, or if it shouldn’t. He tries—while they all dancing the stutter-patter of a siege, lapsing between combat and boredom, ferocity and nothingness—not to think about anything overmuch.

Hirsute Hanush—who must not care for how his unexpected piece of wisdom came out—holds back the warhorse’s stubborn trudging and grunts. Hans is right; he really is even more like an old circus bear in his kindness than in his wrath. He’s got overlarge teeth and big, fumbly paws.

“What I’m trying to say,” the lord says, forcing his perpetual irritation under something a little more paternal and robust, and _aherm_ ing the phlegm from his throat. “Is that no man in the past knows the future. A good man does the best he can with what he knows, and sometimes, my boy, he doesn’t know. We’re imperfect creatures, Henry. As lords, and as fathers, too.”

Henry thinks he understands enough of what Hanush is getting at. It’s hard not to feel squint-eyed, to resent being told how to think about Radzig. But much of what he has—this steed and this saddle and this steel over his heart—he owes to the not-quite-father of his friend. And so to his own fathers, too.

This, _illud est vita_ , is his life. Henry looks away from the tower, softens his tight jaw. “I see. Thank you, sir.”

A final grunt. Hanush is glad to be through with it, and satisfied enough. “Well. Take it to mind, at least.”

Far away uphill, young Lord Capon prances in plate on a mean red horse, gleefully bossing the soldiers about, pretty as a copper coin tossed into the sun. The yarrow flowers glimmer in quarry dust like flour motes over riverwater. He thinks of his father and Radzig—of Father and his first father—in Prague, younger than he is now, when they were only a young lord and a blacksmith. He thinks of his mother, before any of them, picking daisies under her linden tree. And Henry feels flushed, suddenly, with love—frightening, dizzying, so much and so violently he is jarred to his center with the horror of it. There is love drowning his stomach and glutting his pipes and pushing the backs of his eyes. He’s certain he can’t hold all of it in, not anymore; he’s not like he was; he’s too riddled with holes. He is already too full of sickness. He’ll crumble like dry bread in milk.

He grabs for Pebbles’s mane as though he might topple over with love foaming out of his mouth like lungblood. He feels like a leaf too fragile to hold morning rain. He pets his gray horse’s shoulder and wipes at his nose and can feel strange rib bones ache worrisomely in his heart.

He waits, terrified, for the breach—for the spill. But there isn’t. There is, instead, a settling, surprising him with new spaces he did not know about before. New knowledges—new things that have germinated, in the quiet after fire—new ways to exist—new growth—new peace he knows not to take for granted, anymore.

Bernard yells for attention in the war camp. Henry rides onto the Rovna road, breathing so carefully. He reminds himself that if this is his life, then he is still living, somehow.

 

* * *

 

One day, in a sprucey glade below Samopesh, Pebbles breaks a tooth. He won’t eat the carrots Henry bought for him, not even peeled. That evening, after they settle into their forest camp, he scratches his nose against the blacksmith’s pauldron and leaves a blackish glob of blood.

It is a molar, and looks thoroughly rotten. Henry cross-ties his poor friend between two junipers, and then, with considerable difficulty, pries open the horse’s mouth. Pebbles bites at him thrice to punish this rudeness, but knows in the way of animals that something is wrong.

He is still a blacksmith’s boy. And so, with tweezers made for fixing chainmail, Henry pulls the abscessed tooth himself. “ _Trust me,”_ says, patting assurances into the dappled gray neck, sweat-damp where it twitches under tickling black mane. “ _I watched Da do this plenty of times. To much bigger cowards than you! Nothing to it. And I bet if none of it had happened,”_ he ponders, idly at first but then with the suddenness of knowing something true, “ _I’d be doing the same damned thing today.”_

His whole hand is in and out quickly. He gets bitten twice more, and Pebbles sneezes red mucus onto the pine needles, and the distended root twists from enflamed gum like a claw of poisonous river pearl. It comes loose in three bloody pieces. He picks them up from the dirt, shakes off the froth with a shiver and a _yuck,_ then holds his palm out for Pebbles to see proof of something that is not hurting him anymore.

The muzzle is tender and swollen, though the horse breath into his hand seems relieved. They’ll have to cook their carrots for some days. _But after a while_ , Henry swears, wiping the new and undiseased blood from Pebbles’s whiskers, _I think you’ll learn to manage without it_. _I think you’ll be all right._

In the meantime, he leaves the hole open and unpoked. He squashes sweet apples into bland, joyless, easy mush. He buries the part of this body that no longer helps and leaves it deep inside the earth.

 _You see?_ he says. This, he promises, I know.

 

* * *

 

 _I’m sorry, Hal,_ Theresa tells him, sprinting out of the millyard and over to where Radzig, battle-weary from Talmberg’s siege, leaves his son in the forking road. She forgets to curtsy to her former lord. She pulls Henry in all his dirty armor off the closest stirrup before he can step down on his own and wraps her arms hard around his neck.

Pebbles snorts unhappily about the rude dismount, and so Henry drops the reins, letting him free to graze beneath the lime trees in Peshek’s garden. Theresa mumbles mindlessly that her uncle will complain about hoofprints in his yard, but he doesn’t interrupt. She struggles on a messy surge of tears. She smells like fresh flour and the sunwarm river. She doesn’t for the longest time let him go. She says I was afraid you wouldn’t come back.

“I never meant to treat you so coldly,” she chokes, and Henry, who feels as though he has not seen this Theresa in a hundred years, hugs her honestly and lets her cry into his scarf.

“I just couldn’t bear it,” she says. “I miss them all so much,” she says. She says, “I’d hoped that maybe, if we were together, then it wouldn’t feel so much like nothing.” She says, “I never thought it would make me so cruel.”

She says, _I just wanted to be nearer to her, for a while_. _To everything,_ she says.

Henry listens to her and kisses the top of her head and holds her near as he can without making his metal breast hurt. He does not have to ask.

 _I remember it,_ she promises. _I really do remember it all._

Not just then, but in time, as the first frosts make the horses giddy-dance and the ancient willows shiver their leaves loose over the riverpath, he gives her the ring Bianca once wore. It is old silver, etched with a humble flower, not expertly made. It's too small for him, and won't come off his little finger without a fight. But a ring of metal won't die, and the petals won't ever fall out.

Theresa protests, at first. She gasps, sternly, and presses the ring back into his palm. And she does not know this, but Bianca told him the story: how the miller's girl shot it from a magpie's nest with aim like a soldier, how she wiped the ring clean in a handful of her dress and slipped it into Bianca's hand. Alas, he did not quite believe her—he was younger, then, and jealous of some imaginary suitor, and his understanding of love was less-colored by how easily things are lost. 

 _I can’t take this,_ she swears, even as she takes it back into her fingers and he can see just from the rush of love in her eyes that she will kiss this secret token a thousand times. But he wants her to have it. She needs something small and pretty to keep near, to remind her of Bianca, and of their old life. And a little of him, too.

Theresa will not wear Bianca's ring. It was, after all, for her. Instead, she braids it into a rope and wears the metal flower around her wrist. Henry can feel it, sometimes, when they sit by the river and he holds her hand.

Time passes. Despite all—it does.

 

* * *

 

 _Do you know any Latin, Henry?_ Radzig asked him once, under a torn blue sky, as they left the black bones of Skalitz behind them and turned their shared horse toward Rattay.

Henry, sitting shrunken afront the saddle, feels bashful in the way of boys who have no reason to know all they do. He’s already learned far too much—for a blacksmith’s son, and maybe for a lord’s bastard, too. So the poor lad slaps a horsefly from Pebbles’s shoulder and shrugs his own, and as he admits it, he mumbles: “A little.”

His sire seems surprised. “Good!” Radzig says. “It being the language of educated men. I ask because I am reminded, all of a sudden, of a section from the Troy saga. Have you read the—well, never mind. Allow me, if you would, to recite.” And he clears his throat. There are swallows in the air, hunting in loops among the cowbirds and the sparrows. He lets Henry choose the homeward path. “The passage I am thinking of pertains specifically to the human condition. Ephemerality, such as we are. It goes: _Like generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men. Now the wind scatters us across the earth—_ ”

Henry does not remember the rest of the saga. He wishes, at times, he was a better student; that he could conjure up Radzig’s intelligence and his warnings and his parables at a whim, understand the metaphors and couched warnings and literary flourish, defend his sire whenever the young Lord Capon snipes and snorts. But the sagacity of the ages is lost to him. Instead, he remembers this: On the way home, his father once told him a story. He remembers the sky and the sun and the smoke fading out of the air.

 _Dum vivimus, vivamus,_ Radzig finishes, and such is the way this tale, at least, ends.

It must be an important fig of wisdom. He has Henry repeat the words—three times, piece-by-piece, until he’s surely got it. _Can you translate that, my boy?_ Radzig wonders. He suggests puzzling over the sentence in bits. He presses, _Start with the verb, lad, and then work outwards._ He encourages Henry to give it the old soldier’s try.

He asks—nervous, and bashful, and stung, and sorry—and ready, perhaps, to begin the long task of remembering it all: _Do you know what it means?_

Henry has to search his new vocabulary and think the conjugations over in his head. But, when he gives himself a little time, he finds the idea of knowing isn’t so far-flung, after all. He does.

 

* * *

 

On his thirtieth birthday, as a gift, Lord Capon gives him a young red roan, a Spanish warhorse Henry calls Strawberry. It has an impeccable trot and beautiful black lady’s eyes. The tuckered-out garrison gray retires to pasture. The blacksmith’s son, who remembers old friends, spends too much of his time feeding it skinned carrots and cleaning small stones from its hooves.

Mistress Zora teases him for nannying over the spoiled thing so. Pebbles was no spring colt when Henry first made his acquaintance—and though there are much older horses to be found at Neuhof, animals who have seen battle age in ways that brood mares and wagon drays and pleasure ponies do not. His knees in particular hurt him, Henry can tell. His black mane sprouts with spider threads and his shy eyes go gauzy and faraway.

 

 

 _“Where would you go even go,”_ Bianca snickered at him once, sitting together under Ma’s linden tree and twirling the blossoms he’d brought her so that their red petals flocked like butterflies. “ _If you didn’t have to be here?”_

He can’t remember what he told her. Whether it was Kuttenberg or Sasau or Prague or Rome or The Sea. If he had wanted adventure, or excitement, or knowledge, or culture, or violence, or skill. If he had insisted she venture with him into a great wild unknown, or if he had sworn like some gallant knight to scramble up the bluffs of Athens and tie her hair ribbons on Aphrodite’s feet. He remembers only that he said, laughing, as if there were any other future, as if there was ever any other way to be:

_I will come back, you know. I’ll be here again before you’ve even noticed I’ve gone._

Pebbles’s breathing slows in these quiet days as Henry brushes him. He pets and sings until he’s sure his horse is dozing; he enlivens the stall with sweet hay and springwater; he braids his tail and slips a bellflower into the stray forelock behind his ear.

Pebbles sleeps through all of this. When the afternoon deepens to evening and the sun settles into the stream, Henry slips out of the stable, and leaves a clean carrot on the window sill.

He will come back soon, he promises. He picks a poppy to carry softly in his fingers on the way home.

 

* * *

 

 

DUM VIVIMUS VIVAMUS

While we live, let us live.


End file.
